A speaker has been out far too long in the dark, and it shows. The poem opens with a physical complaint: "my head aching with too much night." It's an odd, vivid phrase, as if night were something you could overdose on, like noise or drink. The ache suggests tiredness, maybe a kind of sensory overload from hours of darkness and stillness.
What follows strips the world down to almost nothing. The speaker hears only an owl and meets only "wild stone and woods." There are no people, no towns, no voices. The repeated "nothing but" makes the landscape feel both bare and complete: nothing else is there, yet this is plenty.
The mood is hushed and solitary, a little weary but not unhappy. The speaker seems worn out by the night, yet also absorbed in it. The poem leaves us with a sense of being small and alone in rough, untamed country, with only the owl's call to break the quiet.